Aldo students continue work on Big Ditch trails

(Press Staff Photo by Benjamin Fisher)Aldo Leopold Youth Conservation Corps crews continue work on a trail system in the Big Ditch in downtown Silver City.

Summer in Grant County means festivals, fishing, sunshine, and later, monsoons. It also means, for dozens of youths each year, gallons of sweat spent beneath the sun on one of the Aldo Leopold Charter School’s Youth Conservation Corps.

This year, one of the school’s crews continues the work they began last summer on a trail system on the east side of the Big Ditch. The eventual goal, split between the two years, is to construct a walking trail from the Market Street footbridge to the Broadway overpass.

The crews are well on their way. As of Wednesday, the 21 students and their supervisors were piling boulders and bits of concrete into retainer walls to keep the trails in place and had already added a second ramp down to the trail from behind the Murray Ryan Visitor Center above.

“The idea is you can go down either end and come up either end to create a loop,” explained Dave Chandler, school director of community outreach and development.

The YCC program is an arm of a state program, one of three YCC recipients in Grant County. The village of Santa Clara and the Wellness Coalition have also offered services through the program and continue to do so.

The Aldo YCC, according to Chandler, received two grants of $88,000 and $32,000 this year. That is spread across several programs through the school throughout the year — the Youth Mural Program and an archaeology program included among others. Each of those programs has a partner. The mural program partners with the Mimbres Region Arts Council. The trails program, of which this project is a part, partners with the town of Silver City.

Chandler said a stipulation of the state YCC program is that 70 percent of the grants go to student worker wages. In an area with few opportunities for summer jobs for students, that helps a lot. Chandler said the school and other YCC programs, like Santa Clara, receive far more applicants than there are openings on the crews.

The town aided the project this year by collecting and reinvesting concrete and rock from town road and sidewalk projects to be used in the Big Ditch.

“For those 20 kids to work the three weeks, that represents about $23,000 in wages that benefits the town of Silver City,” Chandler said. “The town of Silver City wouldn’t be able to do that project if they didn’t have the wages to pay for that labor. So, it is a great partnership.”

Aldo student Xavi Khera, who has worked on the Big Ditch trail project both years, said this project is unique among the others the crew has taken on.

“This is one of the coolest trails we have done for sure,” he said. “Usually they’re out of town, at Dragonfly or other places in the forest. Those get a lot of use, for sure, but it’s usually a certain type of person who uses them — mountain bikers or hikers. This one is used by all sorts of people. It can be used by anyone.”

Jon Bjornstadt, one of the project’s supervisors, said in 2016 that this proves that Aldo “isn’t just some hippy school.” He remains impressed by the amount of hard work the students have put in and excited by the trail’s potential.

“Once this is in, we can start really taking care of the space,” he said.

Chandler said these sort of YCC projects teach students how to work in the professional world as well.

“The students’ participation in YCC gets them ready for the workforce,” he said. “They have to show up on time, bring their gear, be ready. They end up building a profile of experiences that is not just academic but professional.”